A few weeks back Dan Borislow passed away from a heart attack after a soccer game. Dan gave me one of the most gracious interviews I ever had. It was years back and I remember it like it was yesterday. His passion for what he was doing was like few others and you could see he was one of those people who could almost will themselves into success.

The following diagram is borrowed from the substantial cranial database of TMC partner in WebRTC Expo and UC University, Phil Edholm who was a major tech driver at Nortel and Avaya for decades. It was modified a bit by me.

The state of the PBX market can be summed up by this chart showing existing vendors getting squeezed between Microsoft coming from the OS down, Cisco coming from the router out and cloud and open-source coming from the bottom up in terms of pricing. In short, it is a tough time to be a PBX vendor.

People in the tech space generally accept the Innovator's Dilemma written by Clayton M. Christensen as fact - companies need to either disrupt or be disrupted. Jill Lepore writing for the New Yorker Magazine questions much of what is "accepted wisdom" or as Al Gore might call it, "settled science" in a well-researched and written piece debunking much of what techies have believed for decades.

Lepore's argument is that the book uses handpicked case studies which aren't necesarily cut and dry in terms of their outcomes. Moreover, the innovators aren't always more successful than the incumbents as you can see from this passage below:

Alan Percy had a challenge... The Senior Director of Marketing at AudioCodes saw the promise of WebRTC three years ago... And he saw how disruptive it could be for his company which provides communications equipment for enterprises and communications service providers. He approached his engineers and told them they need to start thinking seriously about this new standard.

The webifications of communications is transformational and at its core its WebRTC says Phil Edholm as he kicks off WebRTC Expo in Atlanta at the Cobb Galleria. He says that WebRTC is the next wave of communications. He went through a number of waves - in tech and telecom. He pointed out that the Web needed time ot take off as infrastructure was built.

Dialogic announced today they are involved in over 90 WebRTC engagements among telcos, enterprises, contact centers, cloud and Web companies, and public institution. Some of the details are as follows:

Communications service providers (CSPs) demand WebRTC. 74% of engagements have a CSP focus or relate in some way to communications service.

Over the past few decades as telephony has opened up, we have seen the advent of APIs on computers which allowed better control of voice communications. Things like softphones and PC PBXs startd to appear in the nineties. Soon thereafter we saw voice get packetized as it travelled over IP networks. Big data, analytics and a host of technologies have evolved to a point where voice will be heading to a new frontier – and smart voice will be born.

GENBAND Perspectives 14 kicks off this morning - expect the live blog here... Last night the company hosted a networking reception where I had a chance to speak randomly with one of the company's customers in Mississippi - an ILEC becoming a CLEC. The person I spoke with said they actually purchased the equipment from Nortel just before that company went under and GENBAND acquired the assets. He went on to say he is very happy with the road map GENBAND is on and how they handled the acquisition.